thumb|The Polish alphabet. Grey indicates letters not used in native words.
The Polish alphabet is the
script of the
Polish language, the basis for the
Polish system of orthography. It is based on the
Latin alphabet but includes certain letters with
diacritics: the ''kreska'' or
acute accent (''ć'', ''ń'', ''ó'', ''ś'', ''ź''); the
overdot or ''kropka'' (''ż''); the tail or ''
ogonek'' (''ą'', ''ę''); and the
stroke (''ł''). The letters ''q'', ''v'' and ''x'', which are used only in foreign words, are usually absent from the Polish alphabet. However, prior to the standardization of the Polish language, the letter "x" was sometimes used in place of "ks".
Modified variations of the Polish alphabet are used for writing
Silesian and
Kashubian, whereas the
Sorbian languages use a mixture of the Polish and
Czech orthographies.
Letters
There are 32 letters in the Polish alphabet: 9
vowels and 23
consonants.
The letters ''q'', ''v'', and ''x'' are used in some foreign words and commercial names, in
loanwords are often replaced by ''kw'', ''w'', and ''ks'', respectively (as in ''kwarc'' "quartz", ''weranda'' "veranda", ''ekstra'' "extra", some words use in equal both versions of writing style, as ''veto'' or ''weto'', ''volt'' or ''wolt'', ''video'' or ''wideo'', ''xero'' or ''ksero'') and they take their usual positions in the
Latin alphabet, so they are sometimes considered as a part of Polish alphabet and enlarge number of letters to 35.
[https://sjp.pwn.pl/poradnia/haslo/niesubordynowany-korespondent;13932.html]
The following table lists the letters of the alphabet, their Polish names (see also
Names of letters below), the
Polish phonemes which they usually represent, rough English (or other) equivalents to the sounds of those phonemes, and other possible pronunciations. Diacritics are shown for the sake of clarity. For more information about the sounds, see
Polish phonology.
: Sequences may be pronounced as
geminates .
: is sometimes
transcribed phonetically as , though it is phonetically .
''
É'' is a historical letter for native words prior to the 1891 spelling reform by the
Academy of Learning, e.g. ''cztéry'', ''papiéż'' (now ''cztery'' "four", ''papież'' "pope").
For
digraphs and other rules about spelling and the corresponding pronunciations, see
Polish orthography.
Names of letters
The spoken Polish names of the letters are given in the table under
Letters above.
The names of the letters are not normally written out in the way shown above, except as part of certain lexicalized abbreviations, such as
Pekao (or PeKaO), the name of a bank, which represents the spoken form of the abbreviation P.K.O. (for ''Polska Kasa Opieki'').
Some letters may be referred to in alternative ways, often consisting of just the sound of the letter. For example, Y may be called ''y'' rather than ''igrek'' (from "
Greek i").
When giving the spelling of words, certain letters may be said in more emphatic ways to distinguish them from other identically pronounced characters. For example, H may be referred to as ''samo ha'' ("H alone") to distinguish it from CH ''(ce ha)''. The letter Ż may be called ''żet'' (or ''zet'') ''zet z kropką'' ("Z with a dot") to distinguish it from RZ ''(er zet)''. The letter U may be called ''u otwarte'' ("open U", a reference to its graphical form), to distinguish it from Ó, which is sometimes called ''u zamknięte'' ("closed U") or ''o kreskowane'' / ''o z kreską'' ("dashed O").
Alphabetical order
Polish
alphabetical ordering uses the order of letters as in the table under
Letters above.
Note that (unlike in languages such as
French,
Spanish, and
German) Polish letters with
diacritics are treated as fully independent letters in alphabetical ordering. For example, ''być'' comes after ''bycie''. The diacritic letters also have their own sections in dictionaries (words beginning with ''ć'' are not usually listed under ''c'').
Digraphs are not given any special treatment in alphabetical ordering. For example, ''ch'' is treated simply as ''c'' followed by ''h'', and not as a single letter as in
Czech.
Computer encoding
There are several systems for
encoding the Polish alphabet for computers. All letters of the Polish alphabet are included in
Unicode, and thus Unicode-based encodings such as
UTF-8 and
UTF-16 can be used. The Polish alphabet is completely included in the
Basic Multilingual Plane of Unicode. The standard 8-bit character encoding for the Polish alphabet is
ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2), although both
ISO 8859-13 (Latin-7) and
ISO 8859-16 (Latin-10) encodings include glyphs of the Polish alphabet. Microsoft's format for encoding the Polish alphabet is
Windows-1250.
The Polish letters which are not present in the
English alphabet have the following
HTML codes and
Unicode codepoints:
For other encodings, see
Polish code pages, but also
Combining Diacritical Marks Unicode block.
A common test sentence containing all the Polish diacritic letters is the nonsensical ''Zażółć gęślą jaźń'' ("Yellow the ego with/of a
gusle").
See also
*
Polish orthography
*
Polish braille
*
Polish manual alphabet
References
Further reading
*
External links
Polish Pronunciation Audio and Grammar ChartsOnline editor for typing Polish charactersLearn to pronounce the Polish alphabetA Foreigner's Guide to the Polish Alphabet interactive listen-along guide from Culture.pl
{{Polish language
Category:Latin alphabets
Alphabet
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